>> On Sat, 17 Feb 2007 17:43:20 -0500, Dan Trevino <[log in to unmask]> said:


> I need to parse a tab delimited text file of several thousand lines. The
> first part is easy;

> cut -f8 file

> field 8 of this file contains multiple, variable length, sentences enclosed
> in double quotes. Example returned by the cut command above:

> "this is sentence one. this i sentence two. this ""is a quote that may be""
> in sentence three."

> I need to grab the first sentence for further processing (without the
> period, without the beginning quote mark) into a variable, but am having
> difficulty. Can anyone suggest an easy way to do this? I'm open to
> bash,perl,python solutions, but prefer bash.


$foo = [
'"this is sentence one. this i sentence two. this ""is a quote that may be""in sentence three."',
'"this is lalala. "'
];

print join ("\n", map { /\"([^.]+)\./; $1 } @$foo ) ;

Don't bring a bash to a perl fight. It wastes your time, and maybe
the pig will learn to sing.


- Allen S. Rout
- Aphorisms 'R' us.